After Hours Read Online Free

much.
    “But a lack of variety beats a tiny metal knife in the eye,” Jenny told me, surely
     dooming me to tear up every time I thought of playing Clue again.
    Kelly had been off doing his orderly rounds in the patients’ residential wing, but
     he appeared in the dining room toward the end of the breakfast period, accompanying
     a slow-moving older man I hadn’t met during morning meds. Once again, I mistook Kelly
     for a patient at first, in his light gray shirt and pants.
    They could have been a father and son having a friendly talk, except for the way the
     man’s hands and elbows jabbed the air as he spoke . . . just a bit off. Just a bit
     manic, if you knew how to spot it. Kelly led him to a table, then commenced patrolling
     the room’s periphery, strolling silently with his hands clasped behind his back. It’d
     take more than that show of deference to make a bruiser like him pass for nonthreatening,
     I thought, but he looked as calm as he did alert.
    We were in a sliver of downtime before the various morning therapy sessions and support
     groups began, one of a limited number of unstructured “social” periods that peppered
     a given day. Kelly circled like a prowling animal—fluid and silent, watchful. His
     sharp eyes scanned everything, but they didn’t dart. Nothing about him promised sudden
     movement, and I could understand what Jenny had meant. He was an impenetrable, unscalable
     presence, gray and huge and immovable. Comforting to everyone in the room. Me in particular.
    There were lots of boring lulls between intermittent administration and meds prep,
     and I passed much of it—too much of it—watching Kelly Robak. He was on general duty,
     playing UNO with two patients during the pre-lunch break, until one became agitated.
     Such a normal scene suddenly launched into crisis.
    “Here we go,” Jenny said, getting to her feet beside me. I followed her into the rec
     room’s little nurses’ booth, where she prepped a Haldol dose with shocking speed—those
     shots were a bitch to draw, but she snapped the vial open and switched out the needles,
     smooth as a close-up magician.
    “We’ll wait and see if he calms first,” she said, discarding the sharps, “but knowing
     this one, he won’t.”
    Beyond the booth’s glass, the angry patient was on his feet, as was Kelly. Kelly listened
     patiently to the vitriol suddenly streaming from the older man, nodding with his thick
     arms locked benignly across his chest. While my body vibrated with adrenaline, his
     looked positively serene.
    “Red cards!” the man was shouting. “Six reds cards in a row! Six six six! Red like
     the Devil! He’s leading me into sin!” He pointed at the other patient who’d been playing.
     The accused was so stuporous, he looked close to dropping off to sleep, which seemed
     to enrage his fellow resident more. He made to lunge, but Kelly had his arms behind
     his back in a blink, holding him in place as two more orderlies ran over. The man
     kicked, the table jumping and a stack of cards fanning across the wood. In seconds
     they had him belly-down on the ground, a man securing each arm and one his legs. I
     hurried out of the booth behind Jenny, heart thumping.
    Often a physical restraint was enough to calm this type of episode, but Jenny had
     called it—this guy was
not
soothed. Quite the opposite. Normally the shot would go in the patient’s shoulder,
     but with a table and two orderlies in the way, we had to go to Plan B.
    “Pants,” Jenny ordered me, and in a robotic, unthinking daze, I knelt to pull the
     elastic waistbands of the patient’s pants and underwear down. Jenny scouted the injection
     site in a fraction of the time I’d have needed, and gave him the dose.
    And just like that, I’d taken part in my first restraint and sedation.
    It happened so fast, I hadn’t had time to register my fear as much more than a chemical
     rush. In its wake I felt high, but knowing maybe I did possess